Unhappy at being treated “increasingly badly” at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1985 and as a result eager to begin an institute of his own within which to continue his research, 26-year-old computer scientist Stephen Wolfram looked to ex-colleague and physics Nobelist Richard Feynman for advice. Feynman’s honest, humorous, and less than encouraging response can [...]
Archive for the ‘General Tech’ Category
6 Geeky Devices Connecting the Internet to Your Things
It’s time for a roundup of the latest read/write devices that Internet of Things geeks are using to program our future. We’re doing this in part because today IBM announced the free open-sourced Mote Runner Software Developer Kit. This super-simple software runs sensor-communications devices like the Crossbow Iris. Arrayent, Arduino, Pachube, Logiboxx and Nabaztag are [...]
The 10:10 Code
Four years ago I wrote about a way to encode the latitude and longitude of any point on the Earth’s surface to 10m of accuracy with a 10 character code. Apart from a modification to the way the check digit is calculated, the code remains unchanged. The idea is this: instead of giving people addresses, [...]
Fun with Python, OpenCV and face detection
I had some fun with Gary Bishop’s OpenCV Python wrapper this morning. I wanted to try out OpenCV for detecting faces using a web cam. This could be used for instance to see if someone is sitting behind his desk or not. I used Gary’s Python wrapper since I didn’t want to code in C++. [...]
23 Things Not To Write In An E-mail
Every e-mail you write could wind up in court. Everybody knows this, but people still act like it will never happen to them. If you can’t help yourself — if you just have to write that incriminating e-mail — you can at least avoid a few obvious red flags. The lawyer appointed to figure out [...]
Adobe shows off plenoptic lenses that let you refocus an image after it’s taken (video)
Yes, you read that correctly. The fevered dreams of crime scene investigators up and down the country are being brought to reality by Adobe, with just a single extra lens and some crafty software knowhow. Basically, a plenoptic lens is composed of a litany of tiny “sub-lenses,” which allow those precious photons you’re capturing to [...]
A grand unified theory of AI
A new approach unites two prevailing but often opposed strains in the history of artificial-intelligence research. In the 1950s and ’60s, artificial-intelligence researchers saw themselves as trying to uncover the rules of thought. But those rules turned out to be way more complicated than anyone had imagined. Since then, artificial-intelligence (AI) research has come to [...]
Google invests in firm that tries to predict the future
Google has invested in a startup company that claims to be able to predict the future. The company’s investment arm, Google Ventures, has sunk an undisclosed sum into Recorded Future, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that “offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future,” according to a new Google Ventures Web [...]
Square Large Numbers in Your Head Quickly
Quick: What’s 192…without your calculator? (361.) Squaring complex, two-digit numbers in your head isn’t that difficult if you know a simple trick, according to the Secrets of Mental Math author Michael Shermer. Photo by farnea. Arithmetic doesn’t always have to be done from right-to-left—in fact plenty of other people do it the other way around. [...]
Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km
a, A birds-eye view of the 16-km free-space quantum teleportation experiment. Charlie sends photon 1 to Alice for BSM. Classical information, including the results of the BSM and the signal for time synchronization, is sent through the free-space channel with photon 2, to Bob, before decoding and triggering of the corresponding unitary transformation. b, Sketch [...]